From one jazz master to another: Dan Block pays tribute to Benny Goodman

Mitsu Yasukawa/The Star-Ledger"Music is a total experience. There's a thread that runs through all of it," says Juilliard-trained clarinetist and saxophonist Dan Block.

If you want solid, authentic jazz, from early New Orleans style to modern to free-form, clarinetist and saxophonist Dan Block can deliver it with panache.

Trained as a classical clarinetist at the Juilliard School of Music, Block has played 1920s and 1930s sounds with Vince Giordano's Night Hawks, the swinging works of Ellington and others with David Berger's Sultans of Swing, rigorous modern stuff with the great Charles Mingus and adventurous items with Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra. Block has also played Broadway shows like "Chicago," the Compas music from Haiti with the acclaimed band Skahshah, classical works and more.

"I'm into a lot of different kinds of music," says the 54-year-old St. Louis native, who lives in New York with his wife of 19 years, Carolyn, and their 16-year-old twins. "Music is a total experience. There's a thread that runs through all of it."

This weekend at the River's Edge Cafe in Red Bank, the profoundly musical Block celebrates the centennial of Benny Goodman's birth as part of the not-for-profit Jazz Arts Project's Summer Jazz Cafe series. He will display his more contemporary side -- the one that embraces tenor giants like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins -- August 7 at Cleopatra's Needle in New York.

Block's Goodman pays tribute to the trio the clarinetist led, initially with pianist Teddy Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa, from 1935 into the 1950s. The Wilson-Krupa unit was the first band led by a major white bandleader to include an African-American (Wilson) and recorded such timeless numbers as "China Boy" and "Stomping at the Savoy." They are available on "Complete RCA Victor Small Group Master Takes" (RCA).

Block reveres Goodman's trio for its robust rhythmic conception and its advanced harmonies. "That music was way ahead of its time," he says. "There are tape recordings of (bebop innovator) Charlie Parker playing along with Goodman on 'China Boy.'"

APThe centennial of swing legend Benny Goodman will be celebrated as part of the Jazz Arts Project's Summer Jazz Cafe series.

Part of the fun of the Red Bank performances will simply be to salute Goodman the clarinetist, a longtime favorite of Block's.

"He was a very rhythmic player," Block says. "He had great forward momentum. He had an unusual way of placing his rhythms in different places, which I'm very attracted to, and which is very hard to imitate. And he had an unusual melodic concept. He was very intuitive."

At the Red Bank performances, Block will be joined by pianist Ehud Asherie, whom he calls "an incredible musician who's a tremendous improviser at any tempo," as well as drummer Rob Garcia. "He's really broad-based and has a feel that you want to hear," Block says.

He added that the program will include such evergreens as "China Boy," "Lisa," "I Got Rhythm" and "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise," "plus a few other surprises."

The saxophonist's thirst for jazz, his main aesthetic thrust, was first whetted when he was about 13 and listened to the 78 rpm records by Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon and others that his mother, a one-time jazz singer, had collected.

"Oh, man, it was like nothing I had ever heard," he says. "It transformed me, put me in another world."

Zan Stewart is The Star-Ledger's jazz writer. He is also a musician who occasionally performs at local clubs. He may be reached at zstewart@starledger.com or at (973) 951-3821.